Making a copy of Google Reviews

[Kaycie Smith]

Curious what tool people are using to make a complete copy of a clients Google reviews. IS Phantom (GBP Everywhere) still ok to use or is there an easier or more preferred way to do this. I see many people who have review taken down and the answer to the fix always includes sending a copy of the removed reviews- makes me feel like I should be keeping a log). Sorry if this has been answered before. I searched and didn't really find an answer.

 

[Chris Barnard]

Hi Kaycie,

I don't know about the paid tools; hopefully, someone else can chime in.

Have you tried Google Takeout?

It's extremely cumbersome, downloads all accounts from the Google Account you're using (so do it from an owner's account vs. agency account with multiple GBPs), and you'll need to convert the output JSON file to .csv - but it gives you a record of all names, dates posted/updated, and review text.

 

[Stefan Somborac]

@Chris Barnard - I was going to suggest Google Takeout as the free, clunky option!

@Kaycie Smith - As for paid tools, I've used Outscraper to analyze reviews for suspicious patterns. I don't actually have hands-on experience with it—a friend with an account ran it for me—but the output (CSV) is outstanding.

 

[Kaycie Smith]

Thank you for those suggestions @Chris Barnard and @Stefan Somborac! I have used Google Takeout when needing to save emails, but haven't used it for this specific purpose. I am currently using (as mentioned) GBP everywhere and it does a nice job on the free plan, exporting the reviews to an excel sheet. My problem is that I would need to manually do this for each client- which is possible as a yearly or bi-yearly task but ongoing would be rough. I guess I am looking for something more automated.

@Stefan Somborac - I have not heard of Outscraper but check it out!

 

[fisicx]

Have you looked at this:

https://developers.google.com/my-business/content/review-data

It's not going to be plug and play but a good developer would be able to sort out something for you.

 

[Kaycie Smith]

Thanks @fisicx I will check it out. Do you know if this is something that could be automated to copy reviews ongoing?

 

[fisicx]

Thanks @fisicx I will check it out. Do you know if this is something that could be automated to copy reviews ongoing?

Probably. If the developer can connect the API to pull the reviews they can set up a cron job to do this daily or whatever.

If you have lots of clients you can loop through each and run the API.

But....

I've not done this myself so it will need a bit of research by you or the developer. No idea how much it will cost but $200 - $300 would seem a reasonable price.

 

[Conor Treacy]

I was doing some playing around on that API, and it certainly seems like you can pull from there without too many issues (they limit 50 per pull, but you just need to paginate past it in code).

The only big restrictions I see are that you would need to set up a Project in the API area and then OAuth each time you want to use it. So it's not an automated method, but if you're fine with clicking a button and doing some initial configuration with Tokens, etc., then the API looks like it'll do the trick.

I know it can be coded in various languages, but I'm a big WordPress user and love my PHP I'm pretty sure I can pull this via PHP and dump it to a JSON file, and that can be brought into Excel, etc. I'm a fan of JSON rather than CSV these days. I'm pretty sure I could dump all of that into a WordPress plugin and store the data in the database for that matter.

Something for me to tinker with.

 

[keyserholiday]

I use PlacesScout and Yext.

 

[fisicx]

I'm pretty sure I could dump all of that into a WordPress plugin and store the data in the database for that matter.

You could set up a cron job on the server to fire up a script to 'click the button' for you. I've just done this for a client (different type of project). The cron points to a URL that includes the function to pull the data. Set up a cron for each profile you want to extract. Loads of different ways to do this.